Strong authentication for Northern Irish government body.

Social services department in Northern Ireland chooses to protect its information using strong two factor authentication technology from CryptoCard.

Cryptocard has announced that Northern Ireland's Department for Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) has chosen the award-winning CryptoShield solution to safeguard the authentication of 750 remote access and systems administrator users. The deployment, replacing DHSSPS's previous estate of (2FA) technology, will commence immediately and is likely to be extended to other user groups following the initial deployment's roll-out throughout 2008.

"Increasingly we have a significant number of users who require continual access to hugely sensitive 'patient identifiable' data wherever they are. It is critical that we keep authenticated access to this data 100% watertight and so we chose Cryptocard as the best solution to meet our strict requirements," said Michael Harnett, ICT Security Manager of the Directorate of Information Systems (DIS) within DHSSPS. DIS delivers regional IT Services to the Health and Social Care (HSC) NI, which numbers around 70,000 employees/users in total across Northern Ireland. "We are strong advocates of the use of (2FA) technology to replace traditional passwords, but our existing system dictated the periodic replacement of tokens; and so we sought a solution which offered the highest levels of protection but with a pricing model which delivered best possible value for money."

Following the initial deployment for 750 health professionals, system support personnel and third party maintenance providers, there are plans to potentially extend its adoption to other groups such as those accessing centrally held web-based waiting list information. Migration from the previous token based solution to CryptoShield will be seamless and will not require the expensive and time-consuming token-replacement exercises every three years (or less) that were previously needed.

"The information security demands of HSC are typical of many health organisations that are increasingly charged with delivering remote access to highly sensitive information," said Jason Hart, Senior VP - Europe, at Cryptocard. "We've met those needs by offering a secure, resilient and, cost effective solution to requirements that are common to all health organisations that deal with personal data."